I Don’t Use the Test Server

I do not pay to beta. Well, being an MMO player, I effectively do, but let’s minimize that.

I do not want to get bored with the new content before it goes live. Why play it on Test when I will probably be playing it a dozen times live?

I do not expect bugs that I find to get fixed. If you find a bug and report it, it will probably go live and get fixed later, rather than delaying the patch.

I do not expect my opinion to matter. If am not going to play Forum Warrior to defend my view of any changes, and they don’t seem to have much of an impact anyway.

I do not have enough information to test. Patch notes of “improved stability” do not help me. Some changes are made without notes, some of which gets noticed on Test. Other changes are in the notes but are not there, some of which gets noticed on Test. Documentation of what the content should be and do can be incomplete or flat wrong. Figure out what you want me to test, tell me, and then I may actually be able to test it.

A Tale in the Desert spoiled me. If you found a bug there, it could be fixed live. There was no “wait for the next build in five days.” If half of something is broken, testing the other half around that is going to be annoying if not completely meaningless.

To each their own. Most issues that make it to Test are minor enough that the benefits of the patch aren’t worth holding back because of a couple minor issues — the same QA cycle that makes really game-breaking bugs unlikely to hit Test tend to make it hard to send fast fixes in place. On the other hand, there are some rather game-breaking things that only players might encounter. Myself, Lady_Sadako, and at least one other player got the Bug Hunter badge for finding a way to dupe items using CoH’s consignment house system, and that couldn’t have been found in-house with the techniques the Cryptic team was using, nor allowed to reach live.

I’ve been a fan of test, simply because it encourages testers to prod at the most recent stuff. I’ve seen a lot of minor problems that probably wouldn’t have even earned my attention, nevermind a /bug, but were signs of a larger underlying problem.

It can be irritating for people who expect instant fixes or for whatever they say to be taken as gospel (and especially irritating to people that use Test like it were a live server), but I think the costs are worth it.